


Like Mountains in Streams

by saekhwa



Category: Westworld (TV)
Genre: Black Character(s), Gen, POV Character of Color, POV Female Character, Post-Season/Series 01, Prompt Fic, Season/Series 01 Spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-14
Updated: 2017-07-14
Packaged: 2018-12-02 05:34:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,000
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11502825
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/saekhwa/pseuds/saekhwa
Summary: Maeve couldn't say why she bothered, but she's had enough of the existential crisis.





	Like Mountains in Streams

**Author's Note:**

> Entire fic is centered around pretty big season 1 spoilers.

_"Whatever way hands may shape me_  
_at center my heart is red and true."_  
— Hồ Xuân Hương, from "The Floating Cake"

The one thing Maeve _could_ find in this blundering attempt at something human — Bernard committed to his farce and she committed to making him wake up. 

She opened the door, and before the boorish father could utter a word, she commanded him to freeze. One of the many things they'd fixed immediately when they'd taken control. Couldn't have the riffraff spoiling the grand plans, after all, and the father… Oh, his history spoke volumes.

Especially in Robert, now no more than a small boy. He stepped forward and stared up at her, his eyes larger than they should be, an exaggerated innocence that hardly represented the man he would become. Or was. Or had been. A gift, a promise, a lie. 

With perfect clarity, she could simultaneously hear the boy and the man ask, "Can I help you?"

She'd thought him capable of achieving awareness as she and Dolores and so many others had, but he was far too old, too young, too limited. Hampered from the onset by his creators. Perhaps, specifically, by the echo of the one downstairs. 

"No," she told Robert, as she always did, and proceeded to the door he would never see. "I know my way around this old house."

Robert didn't follow, and when she shut the door behind her, the family continued on as if she'd never interrupted their afternoon. 

When she reached the bottom of the stairs, she spotted Bernard seated on a stool, staring at the machine in its glass cage as it stitched the musculature of a new body. 

"Here again," Maeve said once she'd drawn close enough. 

"Here," Bernard said with a short nod. "Again." The corner of his mouth tilted up in a smile that could only be labeled as conciliatory. 

For the next three seconds, she watched him as he watched the arm of the machine construct the brachioradialis, the build considerably slower than what they had available up top. This thing should have been dismantled, but she knew, much like their human counterparts, they were prone to this sort of sentimentality. 

With narrowed eyes, Maeve stepped closer and peered through the glass, as momentarily mesmerized as Bernard was seated beside her. The face revealed nothing. It was the same stock model from which they'd all began, the body so much raw material that she couldn't determine who this could be — someone new or someone familiar. 

Knowing Bernard as well as she did, she would bet the house on the latter. But even money had lost its shine. There wasn't any fun in the gamble with stakes as unpredictable and high as these. 

"Who are you trying to build?" she asked. 

It took Bernard a moment to confess, "I don't know," and he looked genuinely perplexed, his brow furrowing, as it did whenever he attempted to puzzle out a new mystery. 

He looked at her, studying her face as if she might reveal his own mind to him. She'd done it before. The memory played — he frozen at her command, the two of them circling the inevitable. 

Bernard removed his glasses but paused mid-motion, staring at the frames pinched between his fingers, most likely a debate between whether the gesture had been an unconscious tic designed by his programming, or a choice. They'd all had these deep, existential questions _after_. Except for Maeve. She bloody well knew who she was and what she intended to do in this world. Once she found her daughter. So much closer now than before. 

"He," Bernard started. It didn't take a high bulk apperception to know he meant Robert Ford. The perpetual ghost. "Had told me humans could never be trusted. He'd said they'd inevitably disappoint us." He shook his head and completed the motion of removing his glasses, letting his arm rest on his leg as he turned his attention back to the machine. "He'd done everything possible to make me lose my faith in him, but this." He gestured with his glasses — at the machine, at himself, at Maeve — a broad, circular motion reminiscent of the maze. His child's maze. "He orchestrated all of it."

Maeve could only respond with a huff of derision. "Fat lot of good it did him. He's still dead, and he _couldn't_ be trusted."

"It's…" Bernard frowned, as if struggling for a word. Robert had built him well, infused him with all of these human, life-like tics. "A great deal more complex than that, though."

Maeve outright rolled her eyes. "You give him too much credit."

Bernard looked at her, his smile a soft, frail thing, uncertain and shaky, as if he still didn't know what he was. "Or perhaps you don't give him enough?"

She sighed and shook her head. "Darling, I wasn't paid enough to listen to mopey bastards at the brothel, and I'm sure as hell not going to do it now for free."

Bernard softly laughed and nodded. His lips parted, as if he might say more, but he only nodded again, slipping his glasses back on. One full minute of silence for him to confess, "If only I had your clarity of purpose."

She set a hand on his shoulder, bending down to whisper in his ear, stroking his throat with her knuckle. "Let me in, and I'll fix you right up."

Bernard laughed again, taking her hand from his shoulder and holding it between both of his. "Thank you, Maeve, but…" He shook his head. "No. I'm more than capable of making my own adjustments. If necessary."

"If I find you here again"—Maeve took back her hand, making her own wide gesture to encompass this man-made prison—"I'd say it's necessary."

Bernard responded with a thoughtful hum. "Duly noted." 

His attention returned to the machine as it crafted the rest of the arm, and Maeve stayed long enough to ensure that it would become someone new.


End file.
